D-CENT is a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. Together with the citizens and developers, we are creating a decentralised social networking platform for large-scale collaboration and decision-making.

The abbreviation D-CENT refers to Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies. Besides the platform, the project explores how communities might manage common goods and facilitate online exchange with Bitcoin-style digital social currencies. The project started in October 2013 and will run until May 2016. We have a multidisciplinary partnership from seven countries.

Building on existing experiments

The D-CENT platform is built together with citizens. Pilots running in Finland, Iceland and Spain gather use cases and knowledge from people who have already used online tools for direct democracy on an ad hoc basis. Direct Democracy/Political Empowerment – enabling more direct engagement in democratic decision making. D-CENT builds on Europe’s largest experiments in direct democracy, showing how millions of citizens can become engaged in deliberation, and decision-making:

Spain: 15M citizen movement, one of Europe’s most dynamic social movements

Finland: Open ministry Crowdsourced lawmaking site linked to Parliament

The second cluster of pilots will connect these new approaches to empowerment to economic platforms, to extend, scale and link up community digital social currencies, and creating the building blocks for an economy that links exchange to trust, deliberation and collective awareness.

Open, scalable, modular technology

D-CENT will be an open, modular and decentralized platform to build privacy-aware applications. The code-base will be described by open specifications and released under an open source license. Developers will be able to easily write API-based apps plus add new modules. The modular platform enables to share in real-time open data, democratic decision making tools, and digital social currency for the social good. The D-CENT platforms will go beyond data aggregation to enable deliberation and collective judgment, informed by feedback.